Henry Lieberman is Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His interests are in the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, to make computers smarter and more helpful to people. At the Media Lab since 1987, he directed the Media Lab's Software Agents group as Principal Research Scientist.
He served on the board of directors of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the professional organization for AI. He was twice Program Chair of the Intelligent User Interfaces conference. He has edited or co-edited three books, including End-User Development (Springer, 2006), Spinning the Semantic Web (MIT Press, 2004), and Your Wish is My Command: Programming by Example (Morgan Kaufmann, 2001). The fourth, with Christopher Fry, Why Can't We All Just Get Along? (2017) is also the subject of a TEDx talk. He has over 120 academic publications, several Best Paper awards, and 3 US patents. He also consults for industry.
Some of his current projects involve modeling human commonsense reasoning, decision support tools, interactive machine learning, visualization of knowledge and reasoning, and programming environments for education, non-expert users and for development of AI programs. Application areas include social media, multilingual communication, medicine, consumer electronics, management of photo and media libraries, e-commerce, and more.
From 1987-1994 he worked with graphic designer Muriel Cooper on tools for visual thinking, and new graphic metaphors for information visualization and navigation. He holds a strong interest in making programming easier for non-expert users. He is a pioneer of the the technique of Programming by Example, where a user demonstrates examples, which are recorded and generalized using techniques from machine learning. He has also worked on reversible debuggers, visual programming in 2D and 3D, and natural language programming.
From 1972-87, he was a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, now CSAIL. He started with Seymour Papert in the group that originally developed the educational language Logo, and wrote the first bitmap and color graphics systems for Logo, and a seminal graphics algorithm for curve-filling. He also worked with Carl Hewitt on actors, an early object-oriented, parallel language, and invented the notion of prototype object systems and the first real-time garbage collection algorithm, now the basis of most dynamic memory programming languages. He holds a doctoral-equivalent degree (Habilitation) from the University of Paris VI (Sorbonne) and was a Visiting Professor there.